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Should the US Change Metal Coins? (networkworld.com)
coondoggie writes: It may be time for the United States to rethink how the smallest parts of its monetary system — the penny, nickel and dime – are made. According to a report this week from watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office, since 2006 the prices of metals used in coins have risen so much that the total production unit costs of the penny and nickel exceed their face value resulting in financial losses to the U.S. Mint.
Care to define 'gun control'?
The US has plenty of laws on the books at the local, state & federal level... none of which are apparently enough.
I'm still waiting for someone to specify exactly what sort of laws are enough with regards to firearms that they will be happy with that restricts the liberties of law abiding persons.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Eliot's character in "Leverage" summed up those idiots better than anybody else, ever:
"The difference between you and a real soldier is that you are willing to kill for 'your rights'. A soldier is somebody who is willing to die to protect somebody else's rights".
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I'm curious why the face value being worth less than the face value is an issue. Doesn't the US Mint still own the metals? Doesn't it get used more than once? Can't they melt it down and make more pennies? Japan still makes a 1 yen coin, and doesn't have these issues. Maybe it's time to switch out copper for a less valuable metal.
The reason we have the right to wield guns is not to defend ourselves against other people. It is to defend ourselves against the government. If only the government can have weapons, it quickly becomes impossible to fight for other rights being taken from you.
People say 'you don't need assault weapons to defend yourself', but in actuality, that is exactly what you need to defend yourself against the government.
Militias were regularly called out for use in the early history of the United States. In no case was it just the president saying, "Hey, everyone with a gun who knows how to use it, come on down and help me out!" They were organized militias, like each state's own mini-army, run by the state's government.
Let's take the Whiskey Rebellion as an example. Washington needed an army to crush the rebellion. He put out a request to states for militia assistance (based on a new federal militia law) and received it from New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Most of the state militia ranks were small (few wanted to serve), so the states put out a draft to flush out the ranks of their militias. These drafts into the militias were enforced by armed soldiers - in the case of Hagerstown, Maryland, a whole 800 of them. Two people got killed resisting the draft into the militias. With the militias' numbers raised to the desired level, Washington then personally marched into "battle" at the head of the militias (each of which had their own state-organized command structure serving under him). After becoming confident that there would be little resistance, he turned command over to the Governor of Virginia (who was personally heading the Virginia militia at the time) to finish the operation.
This is what a "militia" was back in the days when the US was founded: a state-run army, to be called into active service in times of conflict. They still exist - the US National Guard is a direct descendent of the state militias, converted under the Dick Act. Also, obviously, over time the responsibility for provisioning weapons has shifted from the individual to the guard itself, since wars are no longer fought with hunting rifles.
That still doesn't make the US's second amendment unambiguous. But let's not pretend that a militia was something other than what it was. If you want to update the language to reflect what we call the militias now, the second amendment would read, "A well regulated National Guard, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Pro-gun people should read that as "The founders wanted us to have the right to individually own weapons so that we can be trained to be good soldiers in times of emergency". Anti-gun people should read that as "The founders were trying to prevent any prohibition against state National Guard units from controlling their own weapon stocks."
The reality is that that statement it's a reflection of their world, a world in which the nature of threats and how they were faced was very different than it is today. I think it's pretty absurd to speculate about whether George Washington would have wanted John Doe to be able to own an AK-47 in a world where a national military faces off against other nations with F-16s and stealth bombers.
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
The value of currency is not just it's face value. The value of a currency is that it allows people to exchange goods and services.
Ideally, the coins ought to cost more to make than their face value (to discourage counterfeiting), but the value of the metal ought to be less than their face value (to discourage people melting them down for the metal).
Obviously, for notes, it is unlikely that the cost of printing will exceed the face value, but it is a lot harder to forge notes, and we can rely more on counterfeit detection technology. If, on the other hand, someone makes counterfeit coins, those would be much harder to detect (unless we start making some sort of smart coins with built-in counterfeiting technology).
If you want to update the language to reflect what we call the militias now, the second amendment would read, "A well regulated National Guard, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Except the whole fucking point of the 2A was to avoid a centralized, standing military! The National Guard is explicitly the kind of thing they were trying to avoid (it's part of the army, there is nothing state-run about it.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"